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Ninja's April Fools' Day
Beginning in 2008, the Bungie.net Forum Ninja's started to issue their own April Fools' Day pranks alongside Bungie. 2008 There was an article in HFCS made by Achilles that said Achronos is moving to Hawaii with his wife, leaving Shishka to "get acquainted with the ropes of the Overlord". The article was quickly removed, but Qbix89 announced the sighting in this thread 2009 Perhaps the most well-thought out April Fools' day joke yet, on March 31st, Foman123 makes an announcement on HFCS' front page that a moderator rebellion has occurred with the ninjas splitting into two camps-the ones that agree with Achronos and the Web Team's new moderating plan and those who do not. It was noticed at the same time that five new accounts were added to HFCS all created on the same day, 3/31/09 and all had the same avatar and title within HFCS, Shadow Moderator. This caused even more mystery on the BNet forums. The rebels(who left HFCS), led by Great_Pretender formed NFEM. After seeing this announcement a member posts a thread in the Bungie.net Community Forum asking members what this could mean. Within this thread moderators and Achronos appear to be fighting. Over the course of the next 24 hours the thread will be locked and unlocked multiple times to signify the moderators fighting. While this is happening, moderator Duardo is banned from the main forums for speaking his mind, and moderator Achilles is banned for breaking forum rules by posting in all caps and pinning non-pin worthy topics. The next day at exactly 12 AM, Foman posts this thread explaining the "new" moderating structure that is being implemented on BNet. Community Trickery SonicJohn, CAVX, Cryptic, Index and other members decide to play along with the April Fool' joke by posting in the April Fools' thread that they were selected to be the new "Shadow Ninjas". To further their claim Cryptic created a group called AFEM which was similar in name to the rebel moderators group called NFEM. The membership was open at first with normal members granted the power to post directly to the group's front page, lock and pin threads in the forum. This was explained by saying that the next batch of Shadow Ninjas would be selected from this group and the mod powers in the group were a test. Members who were in the group signed their posts with AFEM in the public forums and changed their Avatars and profile backgrounds to dark Oni. This further mystified members who were not in the know about AFEM and helped convince them that the April Fools' Joke was actually real. Sadly the group was deleted on April 2, 2009. While this was going on Jmh9072 (the creator of modstalk) changed the Mod Stalker to show random Bungie.net members and random numbers for the date. The mod stalk for April Fools' Day 2009 can be found here. 2010 The Bungie.net forum ninjas pulled a prank on the Bungie community by posting new ridiculous forums rules, such as the requirement that one must NOT be wearing pants when posting on B.net. 2011 At 2:16 AM PDT, a member named CWO_Jorge_052 created a thread entitled "must be nice to be legendary or mythic." The thread topic was discussing why Legendary and Mythic Members never get banned on Wednesday no matter what. CWO had been stalking the ninja's for a few weeks and happened to find a news article in HFCS about an HFCS Official Twitter. Bungie.net member Bungie fan 117 finally ''posted about the Twitter feed after a full page of replies. Once the Twitter feed was linked, CWO decided to update his OP aroud 6:45 AM PDT renaming it "must be nice to be legendary or mythic (hfcs artical/twitter)" with a link to the HFCS article as well as to the Twitter feed. It wasn't until 12:40 PM PDT that Bungie.net member CTN 0452 9 posted about the coincidences on why CWO was mentioned twice in the feed, as well as his join date being on March 24, 2011, a day before the Twitter feed was created. At 2:02 PM PDT, Foman123 locked it explaining that the Twitter Feed was fake, and that CWO_Jorge_052 was not real. 2012 On the morning of April 1, 2012, a new user account named "HFCSucks" created a thread in the Community Forum linking to a blog entitled "The Truth About HFCS". According to HFCSucks, he was an anonymous Forum Ninja who was "fed up" with HFCS's shady and corrupt practices, and was hellbent on a mission to expose HFCS's true nature. The blog contained a number of outrageous accusations against the Forum Ninjas with humorous photoshopped "screenshots" of alleged HFCS forum threads and other photoshopped images. The accusations included: *Bungie employees are scared of the Forum Ninjas *Forum Ninjas control whether swag will be distributed to the Community *Recon Number 54 is senile and his posts are controlled by other Forum Ninjas *The Forum Ninjas use spam attacks and other "fear" tactics to make the community think that it needs the Forum Ninjas around *Tom Gioconda (Achronos) is not a real person, and is actually a shared alternate account *Forum Ninjas have an "Uberban List" containing thousands of users whom the Forum Ninjas extort for money The thread in the Community Forum continued all day, with several Ninjas posting to accuse each other of being "HFCSucks" and claiming that they were not involved. A little after 4:00 PM Pacific Time, the April Fool's joke was revealed (though as usual, most of the community had already realized it was a joke). The thread was locked a few hours later. 2013 April 1, 2013 was unusually silent for the Ninjas. But in the afternoon, Foman123 created a post in #Community thanking everybody for participating in the annual Ninja April Fool's Joke. 2014 Early in the morning on April 1, 2014, HFCS posted a thread in #Community announcing that the Forum Ninjas, having been burned one too many times by Bungie (because Bungie had refused to grant Ninjas' perfectly reasonable demand for invulnerability and extreme powers in Destiny), were coming out with a competing game: "Fortune," available in November 2014. "Fortune's" backstory and plot were suspiciously similar to ''Destiny. In fact, the backstory was a direct rip-off with some of the names changed. And the similarities to Destiny continue when it came to actual gameplay, with the basics of the game being obviously a straight-up ripoff of Destiny, except that Fortune would contain an important gameplay twist: players would be low-class citizens; pretty much slaves to the almighty Forum Ninjas, an elite group of warriors. All combat and magical abilities would be restricted to Forum Ninjas only, with other players laboring in fields, mining minerals deep underground, or begging in the streets, with all proceeds of these labors going to the Ninjas. The game's tagline was to be, "They will become legend, and you will help." The thread in #Community also contained a link to a Fortune Wiki with more crazy details about and "screenshots" from the outrageous game (which were awful photoshops of Destiny assets), as well as a Facebook page that users were asked to "Like." The thread in #Community continued all day on April 1, with several Ninjas posting in the thread to confirm that the game would be all about glorifying the Ninjas and would also be an outrageous money grab (with microtransactions, subscription fees, and DLC for pathetic add-ons). At around 2:00 PM Pacific Time, the April Fool's joke was revealed (to nobody's surprise).